The Pro-160 is a Uniden made 1000ch Triple Trunking base that was released in December of 2008 and was quickly removed from RadioShack's website by years end. For some reason the limited stock of these scanners were being put on clearance for 149.97 at your local RS. The Pro-160 is now available again at RS's website, catalog # 20-160. I bought it a couple days ago and here are my findings. It's HEAVY, almost 4 lbs! Display has 6 lines of info with 2 lines having larger easy to read characters (channel name and frequency).This is a plus for those who need reading glasses like me.The Display stays in visual focus from 45 degrees in all angles and has a nice amber back light that can be dimmed . The backlit keypad is a little spongy but works well. Audio output is rated at 2watts maximum, and with the 3inch 5watt built-in speaker I had no distortion at maximum volume.Audio through the headphone jack is clean and it's a stereo jack that plays mono in both channels,so no need for an adapter! There is an external speaker jack in the back .
Scanning and search speeds are quite fast .When manually advancing through each channel by holding the up/down key I was able speed through at a rate of 500 channels or 10 banks in 13.5 seconds. Sensitivity - Compared to Pro-106 handheld ( 800mhz Mot II - EVEN -Pro-160 little quicker ) ( VHF High Band 1 Pro-160 by a fair margin ) ( Air Band- Pro-106 by little margin ) When I hooked up the Pro -160 to an outdoor RS antenna # 20-176 The Air & VHF HB1 pulled in a bunch of channels without overload or bleed over. One neat feature with this scanner is that is has BANK LINKING. You have up to 20 individual bank links that you can scan. This is called SCAN LIST, and you can have any combination of banks for each list and give them a 16 character name.There is Signal Stalker, CTCSS/DCS,Skywarn and weather alert. Now for the negatives . NO signal strength meter ( only with Stalker ) No channel auto store ( only with Stalker ) . Key beep is on or off and one level , very annoying . No I-calls unless you program all trunking frequencies. The ARC-160 is incomplete and does not give you an ability to program SCAN LISTs or have basic global settings like contrast, keypad beep or backlight. One plus is that the RS/GRE USB programming cable # 20-047 works fine with ARC160 and Scancat Lite plus demos. The big question is how does it compare to the BCT-15 ?
Scanning and search speeds are quite fast .When manually advancing through each channel by holding the up/down key I was able speed through at a rate of 500 channels or 10 banks in 13.5 seconds. Sensitivity - Compared to Pro-106 handheld ( 800mhz Mot II - EVEN -Pro-160 little quicker ) ( VHF High Band 1 Pro-160 by a fair margin ) ( Air Band- Pro-106 by little margin ) When I hooked up the Pro -160 to an outdoor RS antenna # 20-176 The Air & VHF HB1 pulled in a bunch of channels without overload or bleed over. One neat feature with this scanner is that is has BANK LINKING. You have up to 20 individual bank links that you can scan. This is called SCAN LIST, and you can have any combination of banks for each list and give them a 16 character name.There is Signal Stalker, CTCSS/DCS,Skywarn and weather alert. Now for the negatives . NO signal strength meter ( only with Stalker ) No channel auto store ( only with Stalker ) . Key beep is on or off and one level , very annoying . No I-calls unless you program all trunking frequencies. The ARC-160 is incomplete and does not give you an ability to program SCAN LISTs or have basic global settings like contrast, keypad beep or backlight. One plus is that the RS/GRE USB programming cable # 20-047 works fine with ARC160 and Scancat Lite plus demos. The big question is how does it compare to the BCT-15 ?
